Week in Review - January 16, 2012

At the Top

We are thrilled to announce that Carla Pugh, MD, PhD, will be joining the Department of Surgery on March 1, 2012 as an Associate Professor and Vice Chair of Education and Patient Safety. She will also be the new Clinical Director of the UW Health Clinical Simulation Program. Dr. Pugh completed her MD and residency at Howard University, and went on to receive a PhD in Education from Stanford. At Stanford she obtained a patent for a medical examination teaching system used to teach students. She joined Northwestern University where she continued her work using simulation technology to assess clinical performance of physicians. During her tenure at Northwestern, Dr. Pugh obtained an NIH R01 to validate sensorized breast models for high-stakes testing. She was recently awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) for this research which she will bring to UW. She is a member of the NIH Bioengineering, Technology and Surgical Sciences (BTSS) study section. Dr. Pugh’s office will be in the G4/701 core and her lab will be in the H4/3 Surgical Services area.

Research

On Wednesday, January 11, over 180 people gathered for the Department of Surgery’s 3rd Annual Research Summit at the Epicenter in Verona. Keynote addresses by Douglas Weigmann, PhD, Associate Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at UW and Clifford Ko, MD, MS, MSHS, Professor of Surgery and Robert and Kelly Day Chair in Surgical Outcomes Research at UCLA focused on the science of surgical performance and quality. Dr. Weigmann specializes in human factors engineering and Dr. Ko is the Director of the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program at the American College of Surgeons. Craig Kent, MD gave a funding update and presented a just out video presentation on our need for philanthropy. If you want to be inspired, view this here.

One hundred seven researchers submitted abstracts. The nine best were presented at the podium and 98 were presented as posters. Erin O’Connor, MD won the Layton F. Rikkers, MD Best Oral Presentation Award for her presentation entitled “Adjuvant Chemotherapy for Stage II Colon Cancer with Poor Prognostic Features”. Scott Nelson, PhD won the James H. Southard, PhD Best Poster Presentation award for his poster entitled “Induction of the Nrf2-Mediated Antioxidant Response in Primary Murine Hepatic Stellate Cells Protects Hepatocytes from Oxidative Stress”. Along with their certificates they won a monetary prize of $250.

Honors and Awards

Dr. Gretchen Schwarze was named to the American College of Surgeons Committee on Ethics. Their mission is to provide the Board of Regents with a means for deliberation and preparation of ethical issues which the College may address.

Special Interest

The G5/320 and K4/745 Conference Room renovations are scheduled for completion the week of February 12, 2012. The new audio/visual system will be tested the following week and we hope to be open and ready for use on February 19, 2012.